Bud Withers / Times college football reporter
BCS: College leaders take high road but they're in the wrong lane

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You say USC lost to California, for heaven's sake. I say, at least it won its conference.

You say LSU played a tough schedule in the SEC. I say, yeah, and LSU lost at home to Florida.

You say USC played a weak schedule in the Pac-10. I say, and it murdered everybody but Cal.

You say Oklahoma's body of work is plenty good for a national-title game. I say, but what have they done for us lately?

You say I'm West Coast-biased. I say the system is East Coast-biased.

The BCS debate rages on, deflecting the spotlight, sadly, from Trista and Ryan's wedding.

For every action, there's an equally robust reaction. For every argument that USC should have been picked for the Sugar Bowl, there's an equally eloquent case to be made for LSU, and Oklahoma.

There's a solution to this, of course, but it's tied up — in perpetuity, seemingly — in these five words: The college presidents won't allow it.

That always had an erudite, high-minded ring to it. The presidents wouldn't allow a Division I-A playoff to befoul the academic landscape. Students needed to be concerned with affairs other than trading woofs on fans' message boards. Football players needed to get to class, or in some cases, get directions to class.

The presidents made their words stick, too, with examples. They:

• Took a clandestine flight to interview another coach while their own coach was still working for the school (William Walker, Auburn president).

• Mentored a wayward basketball player, unwittingly allowing him to break terms of his probation (Missouri president Elson Floyd). Tuesday, Floyd and his wife issued a statement meant to explain her questionable role in the troubling Ricky Clemons saga.

• Approved the canning of a guy who not only had a 40-year history at the school, but had a 58-19 record in his seven years as head coach (Dennis Smith, Nebraska president).

• Sanctioned the eligibility of a basketball player who had a welding certificate, not a junior-college degree (president Robert Wickenheiser of St. Bonaventure).

Clearly, you can see a football playoff would completely wreck the ideals established by the presidents.

It's hard to minimize the lunacy of what just happened to USC — being voted No. 1 by 79 of 128 people in two polls, but getting a computer readout that began, "Dear John." If you can move beyond that, however, the BCS mess isn't such a bad thing.

Now we stand to have a major-league examination of the process, not only from the TCU waifs of the world, but from the heavyweights on down. It wasn't enough to have Congress on their case; now the BCS wonks are getting it from everybody, including their wives.

Furthermore, ask yourself: What do you call the 1991 Huskies? National champions.

What do you call the 1991 Miami team? National champions.

Nobody got hurt here. Oklahoma, LSU and USC all can still play for a national title, while the world awaits the day there's a one-game playoff following the bowls. In our perfect world, the teams would be selected by a panel of seven to 10 clear-thinking people (preferably not Brian Bosworth).

"The Pac-10 presidents have been very opposed to that," commissioner Tom Hansen said yesterday, referring to a single-game playoff, an idea already scheduled for evaluation. "I think it's been coolly received, at best, by presidents of the other conferences."

Let them warm to it, then. When they do, our proposed panel would consult polls, computers and if they want, tide tables and tarot cards, but they wouldn't be beholden to any of it. They wouldn't have to wonder, as some of us do, why this week's New York Times poll has Miami of Ohio 22nd while the Sagarin computer has the same team No. 3.

You there, Kirk Herbstreit, come on down from your "College GameDay" set. Ivan Maisel of ESPN.com, take a seat here. Grant Teaff, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association, a guy of unquestioned integrity, jump aboard. Round up another four or five sane minds and let them sort it out.

They can assess thorny issues like this one: How should we regard USC's season-opening victory over Auburn — isolating the game as it happened, or taking the Tigers in the retrospect of a 7-5 season?

The answer ought to be "A." Auburn was preseason top five. It had USC on its home field in front of 86,000 people. It conditioned, lifted weights and practiced in the spring and late summer, pointing for a revenge game.

And USC won 23-0. That day, Auburn had a piece taken from it that couldn't be regained this season, and it's USC that ends up paying for it.

Computers can't appreciate things like this, but humans can. Even some university presidents.

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com.

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